


For Those About To Tech (We Salute You)

by laiqualaurelote



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Stage Crew, Alternate Universe - Theatre, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-06
Updated: 2013-10-27
Packaged: 2017-12-27 13:41:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/979598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laiqualaurelote/pseuds/laiqualaurelote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I dub thee Hawkeye,” Tony declares solemnly, tapping a kneeling Clint on either shoulder with a mic stand.  “Now rise, Hawkeye, a full-minted member of S.T.A.G.E.”</p><p>In which the Avengers are long-suffering student technicians who work at Nick Fury's theatre.  They've survived manic sets, difficult directors and really bad avant-garde drama - but can they take on Loki's Musical of Doom?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Heads On Stage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [forochel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/forochel/gifts).



> I did stage crew in the UK. Because the Avengers are largely US-based, it stands to reason this AU occurs in an unnamed American university, but I have been as vague as possible because I don't know how UK!tech differs from US!tech, beyond 'bars' vs 'pipes'. Thus many of the technical terms used here may not be American, so please forgive.
> 
> The fic is rather tech-heavy, for which I also apologise. I have tried to include explanatory links where I feel the technical terms are not clearly explained within the text itself.
> 
> This fic is dedicated to forochel, who is my dear friend and also one of the greatest production managers I have ever known. 
> 
> It is also for all the techies in fandom - I have been assured you are out there, brethren, and I salute you.

Clint is on his way to get his morning coffee when he checks his phone and sees the text.  The sender is Steve Rogers and the message is one word:

‘ASSEMBLE’

The message was sent at 9.04am, when Clint had been happily ensconced in a lecture theatre free from the cares of the world.  It’s just past ten.

“Ah shit,” he says to himself, and heads for stage door.  So much for coffee.

The auditorium is chaos.  The stage is littered with steel deck, and Tony is picking his way across pieces of it, waving a lighting plan and shouting: “Can I have Bar 13 in!  BAR 13! Fuck’s sake, why is the fucking steel deck on the fucking stage right fucking now?”

“Because it arrived at 9am and Steve thought it would be a great idea to carry it onstage.”  Natasha is edging towards him carrying two [movers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_lighting), which put together are probably bigger than her entire body. 

Tony stares at her.  “By himself.  All the steel deck.”

“Yes,” says Natasha.  “He’s Steve.  Why are you asking?”

Tony’s attention is seized by Bar 13 about to crash into a heap of steel treads.  “STOP.  STOP STOP STOP.”

The bar stops, mercifully short of the top treads. 

“Forgive me my oversight,” booms Thor from the [fly floor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_system#Fly_gallery).  “Shall I raise it aloft once more?”

“Yeah,” shouts Tony, “right, okay, NO STOP, that’s good.”

Steve is sitting cross-legged on the stage apron, frowning at something in his hand.  As Clint approaches, it reveals itself to be a [boundary mic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_microphone).  “These are lousy,” says Steve sadly to Bruce, who is standing offstage and thus only visible by his head.  “We have to take them back.”

“Oh god, really?” sighs the head of Bruce.  “That makes our list of condemned suppliers even longer than the number of times Tony has mixed a show drunk.”

“Don’t say that, Fury will hear you.”  Steve catches sight of Clint.  “Thank God!”

“Reporting for duty, Cap.”

“I’m so glad you’re here,” says Steve, and means every word of it because he is Steve, and will never take his crew for granted.  “We could use someone in loading right now.”

They both look up at the [loading gallery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_system#Loading_bridge).  Three whole storeys above the stage, dark, dusty, cramped and narrow, on your hands and knees bruising your knuckles while you load and unload 5kg weights into and out of the cradle at the whim of those-down-below, who are very apt to forget you are even up there and will sometimes leave on tea-breaks without you, or even lock up the theatre while you sit on piles of ancient weights savouring the particular solitude of the loading gallery, which mostly involves wondering if anyone remembers where you are.

Clint loves loading.

“On it, Cap.”  He’s already emptied his pockets by the time he gets to the ladder; he begins to climb, and the rungs bite into his palms like old friends.

This is how the season begins.

 

* * *

 

 

This is how Clint joins the Crew: he is walking through the Freshman Activity Fair, and somewhere between the booths of Squash and Strategic Financial Planning he almost trips over a pair of extraordinary legs.  They are clad in black, stretched out across the walkway and attached to a petite redhead lying under a desk.  She also seems to be making a noise like a machine gun running slowly out of bullets.

One of the facilitators pushes past Clint and raps peremptorily on the desk.  “Excuse me,” he says, stentorian, “but you’re not allowed to take up this much walkway space.”

The girl slides suddenly out from under the desk and ripples to her feet.  She has a Makita drill in one hand and a very sharp screw in the other.  “The desk you gave us is broken,” she says dryly.  “I am fixing it because I can.  Do you not like that I am fixing it?”

“Well, you could _not_ fix it in the – ” begins the facil, and trails off as the girl squeezes the drill trigger and makes the bit whirr ominously inches from his face.  “I’ll let Estates know,” he finishes, and makes himself scarce.

The girl now turns her attention to Clint.  “You like to drill things?”

“Er,” says Clint.  “Possibly.   I hear everyone does, just a bit.’

The girl puts down the drill on the (still-wobbly) desk and picks up a flyer.  “Would you like to join the Society of Technical Assistance, Gear and Equipment?”

“The what?”

The girl brandishes the flyer.  “S.T.A.G.E. for short.  We crew the shows in the university theatre.  We make the pretty lights.  We mess with all the sounds.  We build big things and carry them all over the place.”

“What’s in it for me?”

The girl shrugs.  “You get to watch lots of shows for free.  You get to climb high objects, push buttons that make things happen and shout at other people.  Did I mention shouting at other people?”

“I’m not shouty,” says Clint.  “Do…I get paid?”

“In love and goodwill.  And sometimes booze.  There is quite a lot of booze.  Many think it can buy your soul; we do not complain.”

Clint writes down his name on her sign-up sheet.  “Clint Barton,” she reads.  “Very nice.  My name is Natasha.  See you around, Clint Barton.”

Clint is later to find out that there is very little reciprocal goodwill involved, and indeed very little love (though she is not wrong about the booze).  And one year on, he will still be here.

 

* * *

 

Clint is manning the follow-spot for Steve’s gospel show, which means that he has very little to do on the night itself.  So here he is, sitting in the dark that is the upper circle with his feet propped on a handrail, doing his readings using a tiny hand torch he stole from the Shadow Puppet Society. 

Every year the gospel choir puts on a sort of concert-cum-skit, usually some variation on a Bible story.  This year they appear to be pulling out the big guns with the Passion itself; they've even gone and hired in a prop crucifix, which is now dangling awkwardly from the flies with an actor lashed to it, soliloquizing in a plastic crown of thorns.

His cans crackle in his ear.  Clint jumps, remembers he has no cues till after interval, and settles back into his seat.

“LX13 go,” says Steve over cans.  “Hulk, standby for soloist mic.”

“Standing by,” replies Bruce.

The actor is removed from the crucifix, presumably to get re-costumed for his big resurrection number.  “Soloist mic go,” says Steve, as the rest of the cast spontaneously burst into song.  "LX14 standby.  LX14 go."

Natasha comes on cans from where she’s lurking in the left wing.  “Hulk, the keyboardist keeps saying his keyboard's not on.”

“His keyboard is very on, Widow, tell him to go away.”

“Oh no,” says Steve, “we were meant to fly the cross out before the song, weren’t we.  Thor! Thor, are you there?

“I am here, Captain! Would you have the cross flown out at once?”

“No, wait, they’re in the middle of a song…”

Clint hits his mic button.  “Let’s do it, Cap.”

“Flying cross!” exclaims Tony.

Steve caves.  “Okay, okay, fly it out.  _Slowly_ , mind.”

“Can we follow-spot it?” Bruce asks.

“Hawkeye!” howls Tony into his mic. “Hit that cross!”

“On it.”

Clint jumps up, swings the follow-spot into position and brings it up smoothly into a round white circle of light that follows the cross on its journey up into the ether.  The choir, still singing, track its progress with flabbergasted expressions.

“Oh it’s _glowing_ ,” says Tony in glee.  “Oh look at their little faces.”

“Smoooooth, Hawkeye,” agrees Bruce.

“Cheers,” says Clint, hand steady on the spot.  They can hear Steve groaning at the prompt desk.

“You know what would make this even better?” muses Tony. “Pink wash.”

“IRON MAN, DO NOT PINK WASH THE CROSS UNLESS YOU WANT TO GO TO HELL.  THAT IS AN ORDER.”

“Aw, Cap – ”

Natasha comes on cans abruptly.  “Don’t Hulk out or anything, Bruce, but _the keyboardist keeps saying that his keyboard is not on!”_

Bruce sighs.  “Tell him to _pray over it_.”

“Okay,” says Natasha, much too brightly, and goes off cans.

“The cross is flown, brethren mine!” booms Thor.

“Hallelujah,” says Steve mournfully.

 

* * *

 

Cans chatter starts out confusing because of the codenames.  Everyone has a codename: it’s printed on their crew shirts, called out over cans.  Steve is Captain, obviously.  Natasha is the Black Widow, because “her bite is way worse than her bark,” Tony informs him helpfully.  Tony is Iron Man because the first set he built was entirely out of metal (“though it was a chrome-alloy enforced 3D steel grid, there was no actual iron in it.  I didn’t like the sound of Chrome Magnon though”).  Thor is just…Thor.

“I don’t get it,” says Clint of Bruce’s nickname.  “Why’s he the Hulk?  There’s nothing Hulk-like about him.’

“Yeah, well, tell that to the president of Historical Re-enactment.  He’ll never refer to us as the Lighting Club in public again.”

“There is no Historical Re-enactment Society at this university,” Clint points out.

Tony winks at him.  “Precisely.”

Clint gets his own codename after his first show.  It’s an Ionesco play with a complicated scene involving seven different spotlights coming on and off in sequence in various parts of the stage, which the director conveniently forgets to tell Steve about until halfway through the tech run.  They don’t have time to stop rehearsal and rig seven new profiles – they don’t even _have_ seven profiles to begin with – so Clint is upgraded from stagehand, told to go to Circle Left and turn on the [follow-spot](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_\(theatre_lighting\)).

The follow-spot isn’t even a real follow-spot.  The real follow-spot was damaged in a series of events involving Thor and the cue ‘helicopter chaos lighting’, which has never been fully explained to Clint.  So the follow-spot Clint has is really a Source 4 zoom loosely clamped to a boom stand, and the whole time Natasha is teaching him how to operate it, Steve and Tony argue over cans about how ridiculous it’s going to look.

“It’ll be disgusting,” Tony is muttering, “even if he manages to hit each person correctly – which he won’t – it’s going to wobble, it’s going to look like a primary school Christmas pageant – ”

“It’s going to be fine,” says Steve.

Sight for target, fader up, hands steady, fader down, swing, sight for next target.  It’s almost like sniping.

“I mean, no offence, Clint, but even if we had the real follow-spot – ”

“Sorry,” mumbles Thor in flies.

“ – even if we had it, _you still wouldn’t be able to spot all seven perfectly._ ”

So when Clint does, and continues to do so for the dress run _and_ all three show nights, his favourite thing about it all is Tony’s expression.  Bruce snaps a picture of it at the tech desk. 

The ceremony takes place after the get-out, in the middle of the now-empty stage.  “I dub thee _Hawkeye_ ,” Tony declares solemnly, tapping a kneeling Clint on either shoulder with a mic stand.  “Now rise, Hawkeye, a full-minted member of S.T.A.G.E.”

The sound of the hydraulics herald Nick Fury rising dramatically through the trapdoor behind them.  “Starksky and Hutch,” says Fury, “get your sorry asses off my stage before I clamp you to the advance bar and fly you into loading myself.  You know what time it is?”

“One o’clock?” hazards Tony.

“ _Murder_ _o’clock_ ,” retorts Fury.  “It takes ten minutes to get to stage door from here.  I’ll give you five.”

Tony and Clint run for it.

 

* * *

 

After the get-out for the gospel show, Steve and Thor get in the truck with the rest of the singers to transport their makeshift crucifix back to the props warehouse, and Bruce heads home to finish off a presentation he’s supposed to make at 10am the next morning.  “Right,” says Tony, “now all the people with morals have gone, let’s _party_.”

“Where are we going?” demands Natasha.  “The Splash?  The Blue Bar?”

“Nah, we went last month, they’ll remember us,” says Tony.  “Let’s hit the Tesseract.  I need some techno to wash all this gospel out of my ears.”

Still in his stage blacks, Clint finds himself headed for the Tesseract, a downtown nightclub from which the queue stretches around the block.  Girls braving the night chill in short skirts and heels pout and check their iPhones as the line inches slowly forward.  “Are you kidding?” Clint asks.  “We’re not going to get in till 3am at least.”

“You are young and unlearned,” says Tony, pulling a massive coil of [DMX cable](http://www.stagesupply.com/cat--DMX-Cables--DMX+Cables.html) from seemingly nowhere and slinging it over his shoulder.  “Eyes open, mouth shut, follow me.”

And he strolls casually down the line, Natasha and Clint trailing in his wake, and through the back door.  Clint expects the bouncer to stop them, but all the man says is: “Jeez, have the lights broken again?  That’s the fourth time this month.”

“I keep telling you, man,” says Tony, “you need to get them movers serviced.  Some TLC is all those scrollers need.”  Then they’re through and into the club. 

“Stage blacks,” says Tony by way of explanation to an awestruck Clint.  “Like a cloak of invisibility.  They’ll get you in anywhere.”

Natasha peels off as they pass the dance floor.  “The usual,” she throws over her shoulder at Tony, who nods; then she’s swallowed by the crush of bodies.  She’s wearing Doc Martens and paint-stained jeans in a crowd of sequins and stilettos, but already she’s turning heads as she dances.

Tony tosses the cable on top of a speaker and makes for the bar.  “You’re not just chucking out perfectly good DMX, are you?” asks Clint.

“Oh no,” says Tony, “the DMX belongs here.  I nicked it the last time I was in this club.”

Clint stares at him.  “You’re impossible.”

“You’re not complaining,” retorts Tony.  “Corona, right?” To the bartender: “Two Coronas and a double vodka straight up for the lady, put it on my tab.”

They wait for their drinks and watch Natasha conquer the dance floor with careless abandon, gracefully avoiding the guys trying to grind up against her.  “Hey," observes Clint, "one of them’s taken his shirt off.”

Tony chuckles.  “Oh, this is gonna be good. Is he going to try hugging her – wait for it – ”

The man collapses suddenly and disappears from view.  Tony and Clint wince appreciatively.  Natasha extricates herself from the crush and snags her vodka. 

“Was that a wrench you used?” Tony wants to know.

Natasha knocks back half the drink in one swallow.  “No.  [Nut spinner](http://www.redrc.net/2007/09/mugen-seiki-nut-spinners/).  Seemed more appropriate.”

“I don’t know why one needs puns,” says Tony, straight-faced, “when one has real life." He raises his bottle solemnly.  "To the crew."

"To the crew," echo Clint and Natasha, and they drink to that.


	2. Righty Tighty Lefty Loosey

Clint sails across the stage like the moon across the face of the earth.  Somewhere below him, all hell is breaking loose and the foundations of the earth are crumbling into dust and Tony is using a lot of inappropriate language – but up here, crouched in the nest of the [tallescope](http://www.ladders-999.co.uk/downloads/tallescope1.pdf), everything is calm.  Serene.

Lanterns go by like so much scenic countryside.  As he sails towards the [starlette](http://www.first-network.com/downloadDocument.aspx?NoCache=1&DocumentID=1050) at the end, it comes on, washing him in a deep amber glow.  “Clint?” he hears Pepper shout over the sound of Tony cursing offstage.  “Could you bring the upstage barn door in just slightly?”

Clint gives said [barn door](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_lighting_accessories#Barn_doors) the lightest of tugs.  “Great,” comes Pepper’s voice, “now Channel 62 please, James,” and then the light goes off and another one comes on back up the bar, this one a cooler blue.  Clint sails towards it, a ship moving between lighthouses across the waves.

He is being pushed around by the tiny helmeted figures of Pepper and Natasha, with Rhodes fulfilling the role of button-pusher at the lighting desk.  Pepper and Rhodes are here because this is Tony’s get-in, and Tony always ropes them in despite them not being core members of S.T.A.G.E.  When Clint responded with promptness to the now-familiar text of ‘ASSEMBLE’ (or, in Tony’s case, abbreviated to ‘ASS’), Pepper was already sorting gels on the stage.

This tends to happen: Tony will ambitiously decide he can production manage  _and_ light design the same show, then go crazy attempting to realise this decision.  Fortunately Pepper is somehow possessed of the ability to see the lighting plans imprinted on Tony’s soul, even when he’s not in the same room, and this is why she can be in charge of focussing while Tony tears his hair out in the stage right wing.

“Shrink that one, please.  A bit more.  Okay, that’s great.  Now I need you to change the gel in the one on its left, I’m sending it up to you.”  Some twitching of a rope pulley at Clint’s elbow, and a battered satchel appears.  It has a violet gel in it.  Clint engages in a subtle pulling match with the [par can](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par_can), and the tallescope shakes like an aspen in high wind.

Tony comes storming out of Stage Right.  “Pepper, darling, remember when I said to focus chop chop?  Don’t worry about it.  Take your time.  Take all the time in the world, because the director just told me he can’t come in to plot till HALF PAST TWO.”

“That’s nice, dear,” says Pepper.  “Clint, the par on your left, could you angle it upstage?”

“This tech run is going to hell,” declares Tony.  He flings his arms out.  “Rhodey, my man! Give me the appropriate music!”

“Uh,” says Rhodes, “could we not?”

Tony points at him.  “I am your PM and I hereby command you.”

Clint thinks he can hear Rhodes sighing from up where he is.  A few seconds later, the strains of AC/DC’s _Highway To Hell_ come pumping through the auditorium speakers.

“Now that’s what I like to hear at a get-in,” finishes Tony with dramatic satisfaction.

 

* * *

 

 

Clint’s not even meant to be working on Tony’s show, but he ends up stepping in for a tech run which Rhodes can’t attend thanks to a tutorial.  “Thanks man, I owe you big time,” is what Tony tells him, and really he does, because this is pretty much the weirdest play Clint has ever seen.  Calling it a play is a great kindness in itself.

“It’s a loose adaptation of T. S. Eliot’s _The Waste Land_ ,” Tony explains to him as Clint tries to familiarise himself with the cues.  “There’ll be a part later where they all just sit under the papier-mache rock not moving and making dripping sounds.  Don’t freak out, it’s in the script.  Bruce, is the Voice of God ready?”

“What kind of reverb do you want?” asks Bruce, fiddling with the channels.  “Slow Echo or Cathedral?”

“Hm,” says Tony, “what do you think, Clint?”

“Uh.  Slow Echo?”

“Slow Echo, Bruce, if you please.”  Bruce finishes patching, hands Tony the mic.  Tony turns it on.  “PEOPLE OF THE CAST, THIS IS THE VOICE OF GOD.  HEARKEN UNTO ME.”

There is a crackle of static as Pepper comes on cans from backstage.  “Seriously, Tony? Seriously?”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, WOMAN, OF COURSE I AM DEATHLY SERIOUS.  JUST BECAUSE I SOUND LIKE THOR NOW.”

“You should turn off the Voice of God when speaking on cans,” points out Bruce, “it sounds like you’re talking to yourself, they’ll think you’re a crazy person.”

“THEY’RE JUST JEALOUS THE VOICES DON’T SPEAK TO THEM.”

“Could we please just start?” says Pepper testily. “I want to get this over with.”

“WHY, PEPPERONI?  IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE MORE IMPORTANT THAN BEING STAGE MANAGER AT MY TECH RUN?”

“I sit on the Union Board as Welfare Officer,” says Pepper.  “I’m also President of the Investment Society, _and_ Chess Club, so yes, Tony, my schedule is quite packed.”

“…LIKE I WAS SAYING.  Everybody onstage in fi – ” Tony stops and turns to Bruce.  “Why is my Voice of God not on?”

“You were growing megalomaniacal,” says Bruce evenly.  “Thus I muted you.”

“You muted the Voice of God.”

Bruce shrugs.

“Bruce,” says Tony slowly, “I may have let you run my sound desk.  I may have let you fiddle with my faders and push all my buttons.  But if you mute me one more time I will smite you down with righteous vengeance and furious anger, do you understand? Now unmute the Voice of God.”

Bruce sighs and does so. 

“RIGHT, CAST,” roars Tony.  “THIS IS A TECH RUN AND YOU WILL DO EVERYTHING I SAY, WHEN I SAY IT, EXACTLY HOW I SAY IT.  AND NOW, WE WILL TAKE IT FROM THE LINE – ” he glances at his script, “ – WEIALALA LEIA WALLALA LEIALALA, DRIP DROP, DRIP DROP.”

In mutual terror from the Voice of God, the actors shuffle into position.  This seems to involve the ones wearing stockings on their heads lying in a pile centrestage while the ones wearing large padded starfish suits stomp awkwardly around them.  Clint goes into the requisite cue.  Large turquoise triangles start drifting lazily across the [cyc](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclorama_\(theater\)).

“FROM WEIALALA,” says Tony with a straight face.  “GO.”

 

* * *

 

Clint’s nightmare starts the day Nick Fury calls him into his office. 

Or, more precisely, it starts on the day of the S.T.A.G.E. committee meeting.  Though at that point it’s still someone else’s nightmare.

The committee is essentially the entire society.  This includes even Clint, who has been in S.T.A.G.E. for less than a year.  He is Freshers’ Rep, because he is the only fresher.

Steve, who is President, is reading out the list of theatre bids that Fury sent him, looking increasingly tragic as he moves down the column.  “…and in Week 10, _The Phantom of the Opera_.”

“Okay, big show,” says Secretary Bruce, typing away, “and who’s directing?”

Steve is wearing his fatally noble bearer-of-bad-news look.  It is the kind of look that they have known to precede statements like “Guys, I think we’ve painted over the Class A stamps” or “Maybe we should have put the palm trees back in the dock before we put _everything else in front of it_.”

Natasha, Public Relations, looks up sharply.  “Oh no.  Who?”

Steve sighs.  “Loki.”

“Wait,” says Treasurer Tony.  “Loki put in a bid.  _Loki_ put in a bid.  And it went _through_.”

Bruce is frowning.  “Doesn’t he need to consult a member of S.T.A.G.E. to get our commitment? I don’t remember him consulting any of us.”

“He consulted me,” booms their Quartermaster, a role which Clint has come to interpret as Lifter of Heavy Things.

“Oh _Tho-or_ ,” says everyone.

Thor stands solemnly.  “Fear not.  I have taken it upon myself to bear the burden of my brother’s ambition.  I shall be production manager.”

“Yes, well, Thor,” says Natasha, mordant, “the rest of us will be guilt-tripped into _helping_ you.”

“ _This_ is how it always happens,” continues Tony fatalistically.  “All it takes is for one person to _not_ say no for everyone to go under.”

Thor is unmoved.  “What is done, is done.  The bid has passed; I shall keep my word.”

Except the next day Clint gets a call from an unlisted number.  “Hello?” he says uncertainly.

“My office,” says Nick Fury.  “Now.”

 

* * *

 

“You want me to usurp Thor,” repeats Clint, nonplussed.

Nick Fury rolls his one eye at him.  “We do not want you to usurp Thor.  We want you as _co_ -production manager.”

“I’ve never PM-ed anything in my life – ”

“You’re not PM-ing, you’re _co-_ PMing.” Fury spins himself on his rotating chair in frustration.  “Maria, if you will explain the situation to this dumbfuck.”

Clint is not even able to bristle at being called a dumbfuck because this is Fury.  Nick Fury, Technical Director.  Nick Fury is king of the theatre.  Nobody drops a wingnut without him hearing it.  Nick Fury’s lost eye can see things unseeable, like your phone not being turned off in your pocket.  He can hear all your cans banter before you press the mic button. Nick Fury is Ceiling Cat.

“What we want is a split in responsibilities.” Maria is a relief.  Clint is terrified of Maria, second in command of the tech office, but after Nick Fury she is like a YouTube channel of kitten videos.  “Thor will lead the build.  He’s good at that.  But on the day itself, the actual show, you will be the one calling the shots.  You will be on book.  You will be in charge.”

Clint wishes Phil would say something.  Phil is nice.  Phil sometimes lends him techie jackets when the heating’s broken, and turns a blind eye to people eating gummies at the tech desk.  But right now Phil is drinking tea in the background and being stoically unhelpful.

“Thor is a great guy,” says Fury.  “But he ain’t the man to run this show.  Especially when the show’s a blood relative.”

“He’s adopted?” ventures Clint feebly.

“Also,” finishes Fury, “he can't cue to save his life.”

“We keep trying to tell him,” elaborates Maria, “but he doesn’t get that “Plunge us into darkness upon my command, o Man of Iron!” is unnecessary when just “LX40 standby” will suffice.”

Clint glances at Phil for aid.  Phil drinks more tea pointedly in his direction.

“Barton,” concludes Fury, “I expect Loki to bring a shitstorm down upon us, and you are the man to clean it up.  I hope you understand this is a great honour.”

“Believe me, sir, I do,” lies Clint.

“Hail the Head Shit-Wiper,” says Fury.

“Hail,” say Phil and Maria with utterly straight faces.

Clint wants to cry.

 

* * *

 

The production meeting takes place on neutral ground: the café outside the library.  Clint and Thor are there early.  Loki comes alone, with no backup.

“Where’s your producer?” Clint wants to know.

“I am Loki,” replies Loki.  “I need no producer.”

“That’s bullshit,” says Clint, “everyone needs a producer.”

“I have minions,” says Loki.  “They suffice.”

“Well, where are the minions then?”

Loki waves a hand expansively.  “About.  Here and there.  You need not familiarise yourselves with them, they are unimportant and in any case I do not expect them to last long in my service.”

Clint just stares at him.

“Enough of these jests, brother,” says Thor.  “We come to parlay; lead us not astray with idle talk.”

“For once, my fool brother speaks sense.”  Loki slides a sheet of paper over the table.  “These are my terms.  Accept them or face annihilation.”

“We have no need for threats here,” says Thor.  “We come to you in peace.”

“Then more fool you,” retorts Loki, “for I come with war.”

“Dude,” says Clint, “you want to fly in a ten-foot chandelier? That is not, _not_ peaceful.”

“You forget why we came to this land,” says Thor.  “You forget what we mean to do for these people.”

“Mere mortals and their petty dreams,” spits Loki.  “I dream greater than ever they shall, and if you and your pitiful band of slaves will suffer to conceive my dreams, then I exult the more for it.”

“Seriously, could we cut some of the mirrors? They’re hell on focussing.”

“They are no slaves!  They are free men!”

Loki laughs mirthlessly.  “They are slaves, and they shall perish in fire.”

“Speaking of fire, is it _really_ necessary to use this much pyro throughout? Only we’ll have to flameproof everything to within an inch of its existence, and also Director Fury will _flip_ …”

“I shall show them what it means to put on a show!  I shall show them what it means to be a god!”

“ – yeah, ‘cos only God does without a producer – ”

Thor is shaking his head nobly, sadly.  “No, brother, you misunderstand.  You would see true godhood?  I will show you true godhood.”

“Guys, I’m not sure we’re on the same page any more...”

Thor spreads his hands.  “All you do is inflict pain, Loki my brother.  But I, I take it away from others.  I will bear this pain you rain down upon us, as a true god should do.”

“No, Thor!” shrieks Clint, “he wants a REVOLVING STAIRCASE THAT’S ALSO AN ELEPHANT.”

“I accept your terms!” thunders Thor.

Clint puts his head in his hands.

Loki rises, claps Thor on the shoulder.  “Ah, my brother.  Always so _reliable_.”  He sweeps off.

“I am not paid enough for this shit,” says Clint.

“You are not being paid,” points out Thor.

“I _know_!”

 

* * *

 

“I don’t _understand_ ,” says Clint, frantically Googling the market price for ten-foot chandeliers.

“Why Loki talks like he’s a god?” says Tony.  “He’s a megalomaniac.  I’d talk like I were a god, if I weren’t such a fervent atheist.”

“Yes, Tony, we’ve all heard you on the V.O.G.  And I don’t mean Loki, Loki’s obvious.  ” says Clint.  “Thor.  Thor also talks like he’s a god.  That I don’t get.”

“Ah,” says Tony.  “One of the many secrets of the universe, my friend.  Along with why the cable you’ve picked is always just a few inches short of the socket, and where Natasha keeps all her wrenches.  It’s not like _her_ stage blacks can possibly have pockets _anywhere_.”


	3. Measure Twice Cut Once

One of the least pleasant parts of Clint’s day involves attending Phantom rehearsals.  He mostly has to do this alone, now that Thor has started building the set.  The only bright side is watching Loki torment other people for a change. 

Today, he walks in on them practising ‘Music of the Night’, which is interesting because the actor playing the Phantom isn’t there.

“Where’s John?” says Clint, who is now on first-name terms with all the cast and would find them quite pleasant as people if they were not the hapless marionettes of an evil puppetmaster.

“John is incapacitated,” says Loki.  “He shall be so for the next two months.  Vocal haemorrhage, terrible business.”

Clint eyes him.  Loki is standing where John is standing over the reclining body of Rachel, the actress playing Christine.  He is holding a mask in his hand.

“No,” says Clint.  “Fuck no.”

“I think things are much better like this,” says Loki happily.  “John is a lad of some talent, I will not deny it, but I’ve been unable to truly bring out in him the mystique and charisma I thought I saw at his audition.  Perhaps my having to step in shall be a boon to this production after all.  Now, Clint, if you don’t mind – we were in the middle of a rehearsal?”

He needs, Clint decides, a new motto in life.   _Say No To Loki_.  He should have it turned into T-shirts.  Mugs.  Fridge magnets.  The whole world could benefit from increased awareness of how much better everyone’s life would be, had they, at some point, Said No To Loki.

He might be the bane of Clint’s life, but it cannot be denied that Loki is a magnificent performer.  Clint had previously thought John was pretty good, but when Loki opens his mouth, there’s a magnetism to his voice that makes John’s seem like a pale warble in retrospect.  When he picks Rachel/Christine up, she seems to melt in his arms under the pressure of that voice.  Clint should totally be heading off to help Thor measure timber, but he can’t leave.  He can’t even seem to get up.

“I’m not saying that it’s not a hugely douche-y thing to do,” he finds himself explaining to Natasha later, on their regular trip to clean out their local hardware store. “Casting himself in a lead role because he can.”

“It is hugely douche-y,” agrees Natasha.

“But his _voice_ ,” says Clint, “his voice is crazy good, you have to understand I am legitimately objective about this because some days I dream about burying him in a cement pit alive, but _his voice_.  If we have movers in this show we won’t need to programme them at all, because they’ll just follow his voice about _of their own accord_.”

Natasha picks up a pair of matched door handles and whacks him on the forehead.  “Ow,” says Clint, “what was that for!”

“To stop you turning into Thor,” says Natasha. “Once this show is over, the entire world will be saying what an amazing contributor to the arts Loki is, but it will be up to us few to remember that he is also a major asshat.  Posterity relies on us.  Now – ” she turns to the cashier, who has been staring at them perplexed through her whole speech, “ – show us the [flamebar](http://www.flints.co.uk/acatalog/Flamebar.html).”

“There’s no more flamebar,” confesses the cashier.  “You bought it all last time you came.”

“Yes,” says Clint, “but that was last week, surely you have fresh stock.”

“We were going to bring some over from our flagship store in Central, but apparently some guy came in on Wednesday and cleaned that out.”

“That is not what I want to hear,” says Clint, who had sent Bruce to Central on Wednesday.  “We are very disappointed, are we not, Miss Romanoff?”

“Mm,” says Natasha, flicking through paint swatches.  “Ever so, Mr Barton.”

“Is it too much to hope,” continues Clint severely, “that you at least have _glue gun refills_?”

The man glances involuntarily upwards.  He tries to disguise it, but Natasha has already snagged the glue sticks mid-leap from the shelf above.

“They were our last,” whispers the cashier hopelessly.

“It is _season_ ,” says Clint mercilessly.  “You should know better.  Receipt, please.”

 

* * *

 

Clint thinks S.T.A.G.E. is hard.  Then the build for _Phantom_ really kicks into gear, and he’s suddenly forced to re-evaluate his perspective of hard work.

At first he keeps regular hours.  He goes in during his breaks, stays till about nine or ten at night, then goes home and comes in the next day.  And then one morning, as he is on his way to the workshop, he runs into Steve, who holds out his phone towards him.

“Have you seen Thor’s Twitter?”

Clint takes the phone.  “Thor has _Twitter_?”

“I blame Tony,” says Steve.  “As with all things.” 

 **@stophammertime** 7h  
 _Drilling is the best! I rejoice greatly in drilling._

 **@stophammertime** 6h  
 _Cursed be this drill, for it thirsts ever for battery._

 **@stophammertime            5** h  
 _Drill is charged! Down once more to the dungeon of my black despair!_

 **@stophammertime** 5h  
 _I do but quote the libretto of the musical in jest, @rogerthat111.  I am far from depressed._

 **@stophammertime** 2.5h  
 _‘Tis the crack of dawn! And that is not the only thing that has cracked. We shall never make purchase of Hydra Timber again._

 **@stophammertime** 2h  
 _After a night’s labour, the staircase! Now perforce I shall by eve have it wrought into an elephant as well._

Clint looks up at Steve.  “Two hours ago.”

“Yeah,” says Steve.  “It’s nine in the morning.  He’s been in there all night.”

They stare at each other for a beat, then charge into the workshop together.

There is a harsh jarring sound coming from a corner.  Thor is standing in a sea of sawdust, [jigsawing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jigsaw_\(power_tool\)) some plywood.  “Good morning!” he greets them.  “Behold, my friends, the – ”

“Thor,” says Steve in steady warning tones, “step away from the power tool now.”

Thor looks down at the still-buzzing jigsaw.  “But I must needs finish the elephant ear.”

Clint reaches over and unplugs the jigsaw, which jitters to a standstill halfway through the wood.

“Have you slept at all?” demands Steve.

Thor shrugs.  “Sleep is for the weak.”

“This,” says Clint, “this is why Fury had to make me co-production manager.  Because by opening night you’ll have died of exhaustion.”

“We are staging an inThorvention,” says Steve, marching over and grabbing Thor’s bicep.  Clint has the presence of mind to wrestle the jigsaw from Thor’s hand before Steve starts hauling Thor towards the door.  “We are throwing you out of the theatre.  You are not to come back till you’ve had at least 12 hours of sleep.”

“No! You may not banish me hence!”

“Do you have any classes today?” demands Clint.

“He does literature, it doesn’t matter.”  Steve manhandles a struggling Thor out of the workshop; on any other day this would have been a fight to behold, but an all-nighter has left Thor relatively malleable in the hands of someone like Steve.  He pushes a spluttering Thor outside and slams the fire door shut in his face.  “If I see your face around here before tonight,” he shouts through the glass with helpful hand gestures, “I will take it home and staple it to your bed!”

They go back into the workshop to avoid Thor’s hurt gaze.

“I feel really cruel,” says Clint.  “Why do I feel cruel for essentially saving his life?”

“It’s S.T.A.G.E.,” Steve reassures him, “messes with your head, it does.”

Thor doesn’t pull another all-nighter that night.  Instead, the rest of them do.

“What is this we’re listening to?” Tony wants to know, pointing at the speakers with a file.  “What is it even?”

“It is Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2,” replies Natasha primly.  “Perfect for flameproofing drapes to at three in the morning.”

“It’s soporific,” complains Tony.  “Can I put on my playlist next?”

“No, it’s Natasha’s slot now,” says Clint.  “You can put it on at four.”

He finishes clamping the plywood to the workhorse and goes to plug in the jigsaw.  “Here,” he says to Bruce, “you want to have a go?”

“No, it’s okay,” says Bruce.  “I can’t use power tools.”

“Right,” says Clint.  He puts on the goggles to hide his embarrassment.  “Sorry.  Can you hold the other end down?”

There are lots of things Bruce is not able to do.  He’s not able to use power tools.  He’s not able to stage manage.  And above all, he’s not able to PM a show.  Nobody has explained to Clint why this is so.  Bruce certainly hasn’t.  At times everyone is as careful around Bruce as they are around other safety hazards in the theatre, like a broken ladder or a metal drill.  Once at an aftershow party they got drunk in the quad and Clint asked something along the lines of “Are you okay with it, really?” and Bruce said, quite quietly, Clint doesn’t remember much from that night but he does remember how quietly Bruce said this: “Well, I earned it.”  Come to think of it, Bruce wasn’t drunk then.  Clint doesn’t remember seeing Bruce drink ever.  Not on opening night, not at aftershow, never.  Then Bruce, lying on his back in the quad looking at the pitch sky, said: “Mostly I’m just glad they even let me back in.  There wouldn’t be very much else otherwise.”

He’s actually happy to be here.  They all are.  This is the one thing, the one marvel, that Clint can never really get over.

There is an unpleasant crack from across the workshop.  Steve is staring dolorously at his piece of [2x2](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5297/5510460665_053fa5f6c7.jpg), which has cracked along the middle.  “That’s it.  Hydra Timber goes on the banned list.”

“And then?” Tony wants to know.  “Where are we going to get our timber from?  Must we to the wilderness to chop it down? Shall we get ourselves Amish hats while we’re at it?”

“I’ll work something out,” says Steve irritably.  “In the meantime, I am going to stand behind a flat because Hydra has given me splinters in places I didn’t even know splinters could _go_.”

“Confucius say,” intones Tony sagely, “those who screw wood get splinters in crotch.”

Steve glowers at him and ducks behind a flat.

They work till about 6am, then break for sleep.  By late afternoon they are back in the workshop, and so is a newly refreshed Thor, and the set grows, and grows, and grows.

 

* * *

 

After the madness of the Phantom build, Natasha’s get-in for the ballet is like afternoon tea.  “You know you don’t have to be here,” says Natasha as they roll dance mats out across the stage.  “You’re PM-ing your first show next, anyone would say you’ve done enough.”

“Co-PM-ing,” points out Clint.  “Also, if that were really the case, have fun unrolling this dance mat on your own.”

Natasha rolls her eyes and gives her end of the mat a vicious twitch.  "If the two of you could stop fangirling and give us a hand!" she snaps towards the commotion in the auditorium, where Steve and Tony are cooing over the new moving lights that have just arrived.

"Sorry, sorry," says Steve, jogging quickly to the stage.

"Hey, it's my break week," calls Tony.  "I'm just going to stay down here and touch your Space Flower 3000s in an inappropriate fashion."

Steve looks ill.  Pepper, who is sitting on a flight case making brisk notes on her iPad, says: "Would that he looked at me like he looks at the movers."

"Uncalled for, Pepperonata," points out Tony.  "I pay you lots of attention.  I lavish you with love and affection."

"When was the last time we had a date that didn't involve me getting sawdust in my hair?"

"Two weeks ago," says Tony promptly.  "We had a picnic in the country.  It was splendid."

"We went to that warehouse in the ass-end of nowhere because you didn't trust them to deliver their radio mics on time," retorts Pepper.  "We ate tuna sandwiches sitting in the parking lot while they tried to find your order."

"We spent time together!" exclaims Tony.  "We went on a wonderful scenic drive and I didn't play any AC/DC, not once."

"I had a subwoofer in my lap the whole way back."

Tony looks hurt.  Natasha says: "Pepper, either drag him out of here or make him put the truss together."

Pepper puts her iPad away and starts hauling a protesting Tony out of the auditorium.  "See you next week!" shouts Tony all too blithely as he is yanked through a side door.  "I love you all!"

Natasha throws a ball of gaffer tape at his head while expertly kicking her dance mat so it unrolls across the stage. She misses neither.

 

* * *

 

The smoothness continues on into plotting.  The choreographers come in one by one, and Natasha seems to know them all, calls many by nicknames, some in other languages, makes inside jokes about past shows.  The only hiccup occurs when one of the choreographers insists on bringing a prop balcony in for his number, and Natasha calls it out on being fireproof.

“You can’t do this!” shouts the choreographer, leaping after Natasha and Clint as they wheel the balcony out onto the theatre roof. 

“Yes I can,” says Natasha.  “I am obliged to do so by law, and today, doing legal things makes me, for once, very happy.”

She takes out her lighter and sets the flame to the balcony skirting.  Within seconds, it chars and curls.

“Nope,” says Natasha as the screaming choreographer attempts to beat the flames out with his bare hands.  “Must go.”

“How dare you!” shrieks the choreographer.  “How dare you!  The Dance president will hear of this.”  He whips out his phone and marches back into the auditorium.

“Oi,” snaps Clint, going after him, “you can’t use your phone in the – ”

“Hey, it’s me, listen, this stupid bitch of a stage manager just tried to set my balcony on fire and now she says we can’t use it – ”

And suddenly the choreographer is bent, winded, over a prop barstool, and Natasha is facing him with his phone in her hand.  She lifts it to her ear. 

“Yelena, _babushka_ , how’s it going – oh great, great, you too – listen, babes, this choreographer of yours just tried to recklessly endanger my theatre.  Well, he’s thrown some tantrum about the flame test I ran, and he needs to know that if he does not calm his tits this second, I will throw him out and plot his piece myself.  Yes, love, he’ll want to hear it from you.  Coffee sometime?  _Dasvedanya_.”  She spins around and claps the phone to the choreographer’s ear.

“Hi Yelena,” says the choreographer.  “Yes but she – _yes but she_ – okay, Yelena, okay, fine, okay.”

Natasha hangs up for him.  “And I’m confiscating this,” she tells the choreographer.  “Director Fury will be very pleased to expand his collection, he is especially fond of Androids.  Now, go sit quietly in a corner before I give in to my urge to flame-test your face,” finishes Natasha. “Stupid bitch, huh.  Well, one out of two’s not bad.”

“You’re insane,” says Clint admiringly as the choreographer stumbles offstage.

“I’m Russian.  Learn to tell the difference.”

 

* * *

 

It’s the Dance get-out, and Clint is coming back from the flat roof after a good session of skipping.  Skipping is very satisfying; it involves manhandling all your scrap wood and rubbish off the roof, so that it tumbles three storeys into the skip below, and all your pent-up emotional baggage from the show tumbles with it.  Not that Clint has very much emotional baggage from Dance, since all he did during the show was usher dancers through the wings intoning “Don’t touch the cyc or Natasha will kill you she really will” and, when they randomly ripped their costumes off backstage, nobly pretend to be concentrating on the smoke machine.  There was that one annoyingly rickety fake palm tree he had to wrestle onstage during the tribal fusion number, and the sound of _that_ crunching into splinters three storeys below is indeed one to be relished.

He wanders back into the wings.  Steve and Bruce are presumably still in the foyer, stacking up the hired truss that will be collected tomorrow.  Natasha is alone in the middle of the stage.  Clint is about to call out to her when he sees what she’s doing: she’s standing on one foot.

Clint stops behind a lighting tree.  Natasha flexes out with her other foot, toes pointed perfectly, describes a circle in the air with it.  Her arms lisp through the air in feathery arcs.  Her toes brush the stage, and then she twists her entire body and spins into the twist, once, twice – and then she breaks and comes down heavy on the stage with a painful screech of friction. 

“Come out,” she says, facing away from him, high into the front-of-house lights.

Clint comes onstage.  “Didn’t know you did ballet.”

“I used to,” says Natasha.  She starts putting on her stage shoes, combat boots with steel toecaps.  “From when I was seven.”

“Why don’t you any more?”

Natasha bends to lace up her boots.   “I’m a good ballerina, Clint.  You saw the girls who were dancing tonight.  Would you call them good?”

“Probably?”

Natasha looks up at him through a tuft of red fringe.  “They are exceptional.  Given the choice, Clint Barton, would you rather be a good ballerina – or an exceptional PM?”

Clint sees it.  Natasha dancing barefoot, lines graceful enough but somehow always guarded, always precise, never overstretching.  And Natasha in her sleek blacks, sitting at the prompt desk with cans on her ears and steel in her voice.  Whose precision here can never be faulted, down to the tiniest flick of a curving jigsaw, but who has been known to leap from the tallescope to the fly floor when she can’t be bothered to climb down the long way.  In only one of them, her precision and her fearlessness marry perfectly into technique.

Steve and Bruce come back then.  "Right, let's re-paint the stage," says Natasha, as if the last minute didn't happen.  "What colour do you want it, Clint?"

"Black," says Clint, "like my soul."

"Well-said," agrees Bruce.  "I'll get the rollers."


	4. Stand By For Clearance

Clint’s in the middle of a lecture when his phone rings.  Unlisted number.  Shit.  It’s either hang up on Fury or walk out of the lecture hall under the eyes of everybody, and he knows which one he’d rather risk.

“A little bird tells me,” says Fury in his ear, “that there’s a chandelier blocking the quad entrance.”

Clint freezes. 

“It was supposed to come tomorrow,” he whispers.

“Be as that may,” says Fury impassively.  “Folk need to drive.  I myself am about to head out for lunch.”

“Right.”  Clint shuts his eyes.  “Consider it gone, sir.”

Fury hangs up.  Clint breathes, opens his eyes, and runs at breakneck speed to the quad.

The delivery company hadn’t even called him to let him know.  Instead, they had asked a random bystander to sign for the package and then driven off.

He rounds the corner and sees it: the chandelier.  It takes up the road to the quad and some of the pavement.  It is a glass behemoth.  People are edging past it in annoyed horror, trying not to make it tinkle.

Clint takes out his phone and for the first time, he texts: _ASSEMBLE._

* * *

 

Clint barely survives the get-in as it is.  He only does so thanks to a large ring-binder titled _The PM Bible (compiled by Steve Rogers),_ everybody assembling as required – even Natasha, who had originally claimed this week for a break – and, oddly enough, Phil.  It is Phil who, halfway through the disastrous focussing, forcibly abducts Clint from the auditorium and locks him in the technicians’ office.

“But I _need_ to be there,” moans Clint, “I’m PM, I have to see…”

“With all due respect,” says Phil with unyielding pragmatism, “Steve knows fifty times more about lights than you do, and he will be doing just fine up there without you pressurising him.”  He pushes a steaming cup into Clint’s hands.  It’s tea.  “Now, you will drink that while I redraw your entire ground plan.”

Even so, the focussing overruns into the next day, when they’re supposed to have begun plotting.  Steve and Tony force him to take a lunch break in the green room, where Natasha has procured an egg sandwich for him.  Clint picks at it and tries to ignore the intercom spitting out the sound of Tony and Pepper having their fifth fight of the day over the cabling in the orchestra pit, interspersed with the shriek of wood and metal from the wings as Thor takes a drill to the staircase/elephant yet again.

“I’m not coming back, Clint,” says Natasha, as he tries to make himself swallow cold egg bits.  “The get-in’s over, you don’t need me any more, is that okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, even though he wants to cling to her wrist with eggy fingers like a drowning man and keep her with him for the show.  She’s worked three shows non-stop and he’s fully crewed – Tony’s managed to get Pepper in as onstage sound – so he doesn’t need her, promised he wouldn’t.  “See you, Tasha.”

She squeezes his hand, gives him a crooked smile and leaves.  Clint swallows more cold egg bits and pulls himself together to face what turns out to be four hours of plotting with Loki.

 

* * *

 

The dress run happens on opening night.  Opening night.  Two hours before they let the audience in.

“LX136 go,” says Clint, and stares with ruinous epiphany at this apocalypse of a production mushrooming before his eyes.

‘Hell hath no Fury,’ intones Thor in his ear, ‘for he is here in the auditorium with us.’

Clint turns to find himself staring into the single eye of Nick Fury.  “Barton,” says Fury.  “Your dress is going overtime.  I must insist you halt for dinner.”

“But sir,” ventures Clint hopelessly, “we’ve still got three major numbers to – ”

“Barton,” and here Fury’s eye literally _glints,_ “I INSIST.”

Clint winces, gets on cans.  “Tony, Voice-of-God everyone – we’re cutting the dress.”

Tony whistles.  “Wow.  Fuck.”

“Yes,” agrees Clint.  “Wow Fuck is very good.  Do it.”

Loki, from atop a plastic tombstone, is gleefully shooting pyro across the plywood graveyard that Clint and Natasha  spent two days flameproofing.  Tony’s Voice of God cuts in across all this: “DRESS RUN IS CUT.  I REPEAT, DRESS RUN IS CUT.  RETURN TO YOUR DRESSING ROOMS. PREPARE FOR ACTUAL SHOW.”

Clint turns to ask Fury if he is satisfied, but Fury has vanished.  On turning back he is confronted with an apoplectic Loki.

“ _You’ve cut my dress_ ,” hisses Loki.  “I should have known better than trust my show to you _incompetents_.”

Clint doesn’t say anything in his own defence.  He actually can’t.  He’s been functioning on about three hours of sleep the whole week, and conjunctions right now are a challenge, let alone wit and biting sarcasm.  He is still in the rudimentary stage of constructing some kind of one-liner when Loki suddenly and unexpectedly bursts into tears and flings himself on Clint.  Which is something that the PM Bible definitely does _not_ have a chapter on.

“Um,” says Clint.  He pats Loki on the back awkwardly.  “There.  There.”

“Do you have any idea the kind of pressure I’m under?” Loki sobs into Clint’s clavicle.

“Not really,” says Clint.  “I have difficulty even conceiving that anybody would be stupid enough to try and direct, produce _and_ act in the same musical.”

Loki grabs Clint’s shoulders with both hands.  “I have given this show everything, do you understand?  _Everything_.”

Phil appears behind the hysterical Loki and coughs politely to gain their attention.  He succeeds in getting only Clint’s, settles for that and says: “Director Fury would like you to evacuate the auditorium in five.”

“Yes, Phil, I’ve got this,” Clint hisses back, trying to disentangle himself from Loki.  Phil gives the spectacle of Loki’s histrionics a look of utterly straight-faced disinterest and vanishes quite as efficiently as he appeared.  Clint almost expects him to click his heels.  He attempts shaking Loki again.  “Would you please stop crying, it makes me uncomfortable.  Also your make-up is smudging and you look ridiculous.”

Loki straightens.  “Ridiculous? You’re ridiculous.”

“I’m not the one bawling on his production manager in a shiny cloak with half a pound of make-up stuck to the side of his face,” points out Clint, “but oh, what do I know.”

“You think you own this show,” hisses Loki.  “You think you can come in here and call all the shots and give the orders for my show, _my show_ – but I say to you, Clint Barton, that I have worked too long and too hard on this musical to take orders from you.”

Something cold settles in Clint’s gut.  “ _Thor nearly killed himself working on your set._ ” 

Loki doesn’t even seem to hear.  “You are nobody, all of you.  Nobody knows who you are.  Nobody will ever remember you and you know this, that’s why you play all your petty games of control, but in the end _all they will remember is me,_ and your name will be ashes in the wind...”

Clint thinks suddenly of all the ways he could hurt Loki, right here, right now.  Kneecap him with a clamp.  Drop the iron curtain on him.  Put a 12mm drill-bit through his eye.  These are all surprisingly easy options.

However, he never gets to find out if he actually would - because suddenly there is this sound of anger from behind him, almost bestial, somewhere between a growl and a roar.  Clint has a second to think _What the fuck_ before he is pushed out of the way and Bruce punches Loki in the face.

 

* * *

 

“On the bright side,” points out Tony, “he’s got a mask on for most of the performance.”

“He takes it off at the end,” says Steve.

“He’s meant to be deformed.  We’ve made it easier for Make-up.”

“Natasha’s not picking up,” says Clint.  He hasn’t eaten dinner.  He hasn’t eaten anything since yesterday, but he doesn’t really care, because Fury has just banished his flyperson from the theatre for violent assault and growled something about _consequences later_ , and Clint can put up no solid arguments against this banishment even if he dared question Fury’s orders because _Bruce was trying to beat Loki’s brains out on the prompt desk,_ for crying out the fuck out loud.  And Natasha is not picking up.

“Phil, how mad would Fury be if we got you to leave tech office duty for just – ”

“Ballistic,” says Phil.  “Perish the thought.”

“Perhaps he wishes my brother’s production to fall,” murmurs Thor.  “It would not be unlike his wont.”

“Natasha picked up yet?” says Pepper.

“No.”  Clint texts her instead, fingers clumsy for trembling: _bruce hulkd out we r down one flys need u now_

“Shit,” says Tony suddenly, “shit, Clint, incoming, somebody’s trying to get onstage, they’ve sidestepped Front of House – ”

“What?” Clint tries to see.  “Fuck, I do _not_ need – ”

“ – they’re _stepping on the orchestra_  – ”

“Wait,” says Steve, “isn’t that…”

The tabs ripple and part.  Clint jumps out of his seat, cans cable notwithstanding, ready to toss this invader back into the pit, audience member or no – and freezes.

“You couldn’t have come through stage door?”

Natasha flicks a ticket stub at him.  “Was already in the auditorium.  Couldn’t be bothered.”

 

* * *

 

“How’d you get a comp ticket?” demands Clint, watching Natasha unbuckle her six-inch heels and shove them under his chair. 

“Hello Natasha, you look nice, thank you for saving my show,” retorts Natasha.  “I asked Maria.  It was meant to be a surprise.”

“Oh,” says Clint.  “Thanks.”  She’s wearing some kind of red scoop neck dress that flutters up top and Christ, that is a _lot_ of leg – “and…you do look nice.”

“Sorry about the dress,” says Natasha.  “Stage blacks in the wash.”

“I totally forgive you,” says Clint.

Natasha narrows her eyes at him and shimmies barefoot up the fly-ladder.  Clint pointedly avoids looking up as she goes.  A couple of cast members are less polite; one idiot makes a soft catcall, and Natasha doesn’t even look down, pulls a piece of electrical tape out of nowhere and flicks it bang into his open mouth.  “Next time that happens, it’ll be a 5kg weight,” she calls, while the guy splutters and his castmate endeavours to Heimlich the tape out of him. 

Phil appears.  “We’re waiting on clearance.”

“Right.”  Clint grabs for his cans.  “Flies? Flies on cans?”

A short pause, then Natasha, breathless: “Flies on cans.”  She’s greeted by a chorus of cans welcome.

“S’up, Widow.”

“Greetings!”

“Widow’s in her web, all’s well with the world.”

“Weren’t you on a date?” This from Steve, as ever sounding vaguely paternal.

“Yes I was,” says Natasha, “and no, Cap, it is absolutely none of your business.”

The phone in Phil’s hand comes to life; Phil puts it to his ear.  “We have clearance,” he tells Clint.

They have clearance.  Clint stares at his script, the print dialogue melding with his pencilled cues.  Natasha was on a date.  Natasha was at his show, _with a date_ , _she_ was taking someone else to _his musical,_ but at the same time _he_ ’d called her, and _she_ ’d come in, and he’s never cued a show in his life and now this entire performance is waiting on his word to begin and they have clearance, _they have clearance_.

Clint closes his eyes and sucks in his breath, like he’s follow-spotting, nothing more.  Hold your breath when you sight your target.  Release it as you slide the fader up. 

He flips the lever that tells the conductor to get ready, turns his cans on.  “We have clearance.  Sound-off.”

“Lights standing by.”  Steve at the tech booth.  “Sound standing by.”  Tony beside him.  “Backstage standing by.”  Thor in the other wing.  “Onstage sound standing by.”  Pepper at the mic pack table.

“Flies standing by.”

The light from the orchestra pit flashes green.

“Everybody,” says Clint.  “Go.”


	5. Just Gaff It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has taken longer than I expected to get up! In my defence, this master's degree is not really agreeing with the fanfiction.

In the first act, everything goes wrong.

First it’s the chandelier.  It’s supposed to lift off the ground when the overture starts up, and it does lurch quite magnificently into the air at first – where it stops, just at head height.

“What,” says Tony over cans, “the everlasting fuck?”

The chandelier remains where it is.  The orchestra keeps going, though the conductor is probably shitting himself. The ensemble attempts to affect the scene change, ducking under the chandelier.  Loki has appeared backstage and is poking Clint with the Phantom’s staff, cursing incoherently.  Clint has to fend him off with the cans cable.  “Tasha,” he hisses into his mic, forgetting codenames, “Tasha, _what the fuck’s going on_?”

One actor runs onstage without looking and crashes into the chandelier, making the crystals quiver dangerously.  Clint manages to trap Loki’s wrist with the cable and disarms him.  “Poke me again and I’ll finish what Bruce started,” he threatens, and sticks the staff behind the prompt desk. 

Finally, _finally_ , the chandelier moves.  It begins its ponderous ascent upwards, as the stagehands scatter and the conductor, who has been effectively improvising a loop on the overture for almost a minute, finally leads the orchestra into the strains of the first scene.  “Lights _go_ ,” says Clint over the collective sigh of relief over cans.

“I want my staff back!” rants Loki.  “I am the fucking _director_ here – ”

Clint whips around.  “And _I_ ,” he snaps, “am your _production manager_.  You’ll get your stick back before you go onstage.  Now go sit the fuck down in your dressing room and _wait for your cue_.”

He thinks for a second that Loki might throttle him with his bare hands, but then he whirls on his heel, cloak flaring out, and storms out of the wings. 

Natasha comes back on cans, breathless.  “Sorry about that.  Dress caught on the fly ropes.”

“Oh gosh,” says Pepper.  “Was it nice?”

“Vintage.”

“I am so sorry,” says Pepper fervently.

“And that is why,” says Phil, “we wear stage blacks while working.”

“They are in the _wash_ ,” snaps Natasha, “give me a break.  Oh wait, I was supposed to have one.  Whoops.”

“Natasha, I am sorry about your dress,” says Clint.  “I will buy you a new one and charge it to the musical.  But I really, really need that to absolutely not happen again for the rest of this show, okay?”

“It won’t,” says Natasha.  “I took it off.”

There is a long pause, in which everyone backstage does their damnedest best not to look up.

“Holy shiiiit.”

“TONY.”

“Don’t worry, Pepper, when people walk about on the fly floor naked I always imagine they’re you instead.”

 “Flies standby to kill the backdrop,” says Clint in desperation, even though the cue is not for another two pages.

“At least,” says Thor, “we have survived the worst.  It can only get better from here.”

Obviously this is the moment when all the mic packs start malfunctioning.

 

* * *

 

“Pepper, you need to grab Loki right now because his mic is BANGING.”

Pepper replies with the sound of some kind of mêlée Clint really can’t pay attention to because he is cueing like a crazy person: “LX41 go! LX42 go! LX43 go!  Thor, stand by smoke machine!  LX44 go!”

Pepper comes back on cans, breathless.  “Couldn’t grab him, he’s gone back on for _Phantom of the Opera_.”

“Ah, fuck us all sideways – ”

“SHUT UP I AM TRYING TO CUE,” snaps Clint.  “SMOKE MACHINE GO.”

Onstage, Christine finishes singing her part and the Phantom begins.  The resultant feedback causes part of Clint’s soul to die. 

“Fuck fuck fuck,” Tony is chanting under his breath, “he sounds like he’s been sodomised by a screwdriver – ”

“I only wish he was really,” says Natasha wistfully.

“SHUT UP EVERYBODY.  Widow stand by to take out the floating candles.”

“Widow standing – oh, _hi there director Fury_.”

Everyone on cans emits a hastily-muffled whine of terror.

“ _What’s he doing on the fly floor?”_ whispers Steve. 

“Director Fury, how nice of you to come in through the secret fly door known only to yourself and surprise us!” says Natasha loudly.  “What brings you to these heights!  Oh, just seeing how we’re doing! You are so kind, director Fury! We are doing just fine!”

“ _Has he said anything about you being, um, naked?”_

“He told me to not get ropeburn anywhere unnecessary and left.  Also, he wants you to know that there’s no point whispering over cans since he can’t possibly hear you anyway.”

“…I do not understand how that works,” says Thor.

“Fuck this,” decides Tony, “I’m going off cans, I need to hear.”

“…I kept saying he should have found a sound reader,” remarks Steve in the wake of Tony’s departure, “but he wouldn’t listen.”

“We didn’t _have_ enough people for a sound reader, now _everybody shut up_.” Clint flips pages in the libretto furiously.  “Thor, stand by with the boat.”

“The boat awaits!” exclaims Thor with exuberance.

The boat is some kind of radio-controlled contraption that would probably have cost them as much as the chandelier to hire, if Tony had not managed to wire up some old canoe he claims to have found in an outhouse.  Clint had taken his word for it and not said anything when circulars about missing equipment from Kayaking and Water Sports Club had started going round.  He’s quite sure that if anyone from Kayaking and Water Sports had been present, they would have forgiven them just for the beauty of the sight of Loki and Rachel gliding smoothly across an indigo-washed stage.

Tony must have managed to equalise the levels on Loki’s mic, because he comes back on cans.  “Sound back on cans, what up – ”

The boat reaches Stage Right and crashes into a boom.

“SHIT,” says everyone on cans simultaneously.  Clint is forced to leap out of his seat to steady the boom.  Rachel promptly trips over his cans cable and rips it out. 

“LX45 GO,” he finds himself shouting into an unplugged mic, but fortunately Steve goes ahead without him and mercifully puts them into blackout all the same.

 

* * *

 

Interval happens.  Clint has no idea how they get there.  The screech and groan of the iron curtain coming down between them and the audience scrapes long grooves down the walls of his soul.

He stares blankly at the blinking timer on the prompt desk, as the cast noisily filter back into their dressing rooms for costume changes, emptying the wings like water draining from a sink.  They're being far too noisy, but he can't find the strength to tell them to shut up.  He expects their director to show up any moment to start yelling again, but happily Loki is keeping it low-key for the moment.  

"Drink, comrade," Thor is at his side, pressing a bottle of water the size of an oil keg into his hand.  Clint realises he is so parched he's nearly hoarse.  Of course he'd forgotten to bring water.  Clint drinks gratefully and just barely avoids spitting it out again when Thor claps him on the back and booms that Clint is doing well.

"It is all very bad," says Clint in a daze.  "It is all very bad."

"Shut up, it's fine," replies Pepper breezily.  "I'm just going to pop out onto the flat roof for some air, is that all right?"

"Yeah," says Clint.  "Sure."  He knows that Tony is out on the flat roof right now, smoking his way through a fresh pack and having a nervous breakdown.   Pepper smiles at him, her mouth bright and fine cobweb lines of strain around the corners of her eyes, and goes out the back.  Sometimes Clint envies Tony a lot.

Natasha comes shimmying down the ladder, the soles of her feet black as the stage.  She says nothing, but she touches Clint once, lightly, below his left shoulderblade.  Then she takes Thor's bottle, drinks from it, and disappears downstairs.

Steve comes in through the back.  "You're doing great," he tells Clint.  "You're doing just great."

_I'm not made of fucking glass_ , Clint wants to shout at all of them.  But that would be unfair.  So instead he says: "We gotta pre-set the second half."

And as everyone starts moving around him, he suddenly wonders what Bruce is up to.

 

* * *

 

The second half goes so well Clint is almost inclined to think the worst is over.  That is, until they pass the point where they had to cut the dress rehearsal.  Clint likes to think of that as the 'Point of No Return'.

"LX151 go," he says, and actors start running onstage as the lights dim to pull gravestones and fake ivy offstage.  Clint can hear the staircase/elephant trundling up behind him, dragged by no less than seven cast members.  He leans into the wall to let them pass.

They will never know what happens here.  Perhaps the staircase/elephant, despite weeks of TLC from Thor, is still structurally unsound.  Perhaps the actors are not dragging it in the way Thor taught them, probably because Loki is a diabolical moron who told them to deliberately disobey everything their stage manager tells them to do.  Perhaps it's because they just never got round to practising this scene change.

Something catches on the edge of the flat.  Wedged between the wall and an elephant leg, Clint can't see what it is.  What it does is send the actors into a panic: " -  _shit, shitshitshit_ \- " Clint hears them hissing, and then they all start pulling violently, and before Clint can tell them to stop, there's the yawning sound of splinters and screws snapping free of wood, and the whole thing teeters on its stand -

Clint realises in a split second that there are two ways the thing can fall: left, where it will rip a hole through at least one flat, and right.  Clint reaches up and grabs the elephant's ear and  _pulls_ for dear life, and the staircase/elephant falls onto him.

_Yes_ , thinks Clint,  _this puts a whole new spin into taking one for the team_.

He can't see shit.  He can  _feel_ , though, and while he's not being crushed to death because the prompt desk is taking most of the weight, his left leg is in dire agony and there is a piece of plywood jammed into his neck.  Every single person on cans is hissing desperately at him to say when they can go, and thank all the gods Clint left his mic on because there is no way he could have reached it in this position...

"...nobody panic," he breathes, "but the elephant has fallen on me."

There is a stunned silence on cans.  Even Tony fails to swear.

The orchestra has started frantically looping the scene-change music.  Clint hears Pepper say: "Thor is relinquishing his apparat...I mean, he's going off cans - "

"Oh," says Natasha, from her vantage point in flies.  "Oh, oh shit."

Clint feels rather than sees the actors scattering in consternation, parting like the Red Sea.  Through a gap in the wood he glimpses Thor galloping towards him at full speed.  In his hands is the fire axe from the workshop they have been told never,  _never_ to use.

"Um," begins Clint.  Thor skids to a halt, brings the axe up over his shoulder and _swings_.

The axe blade buries itself into the wall inches from Clint's head.  Thor swings again, and again.  Wood crunches.  Then the weight is off Clint and the staircase/elephant - most of it, at least - is disappearing into the darkness onstage.

"What is going on?" Steve is all but shouting over cans.  " _What is going on_?"

"LX152," says Clint, his voice shaking, "go."

The lights fade up into a warm, fiery glow all over the stage.  The cast, startled suddenly into action, begin an uncertain rendition of 'Don Juan Triumphant'.  

"Clint," repeats Steve, "what  _happened_ _?_ Where's Thor?"

"Well," says Clint carefully, "Thor basically hacked the back braces off the elephant and carried it onstage all by himself.  Where he still is.  I think."

There is a long pause, while they contemplate whether the audience will notice a 2m-tall blond man standing onstage, trying to blend into a staircase.

"Couldn't you have waited till he got off?" 

"It has no back braces, if he puts it down now the whole thing will fall over," explains Clint wearily.  

"It's a very long scene," Steve points out.  

"His hair matches the drapes," adds Tony helpfully.

Clint pulls himself together.  "Captain, stand by for LX153.  Widow, I need you on the ground to cover Stage Left for Thor.  Your next fly cue is not for eight pages.  Pepper, when you have a moment, there is a lot of wood in this wing right now and I need it taken to the workshop before actors step on it.  Okay? LX153 go."

"Coming," he hears Natasha and Pepper say.  "LX gone," says Steve, as amber light blossoms upstage left.  Clint thinks he hears a new, quiet kind of respect in his voice - and also a kind of relief.  Some days Steve is happy not to be the one to have to make all the calls.

Clint looks past the prompt desk, to where Thor is stuck onstage.  Thor is standing stiff as a statue, but as Clint catches his eye, he turns his face a millimetre towards the right wing and gives the slightest majestical nod.

_Two more numbers_ , thinks Clint.  The digital clock on the prompt desk blinks at him in malice. 

 

* * *

 

Ironically, the one thing Clint had most been afraid of – the pyro setting something on fire – doesn’t happen.

Which only goes to show that while everyone not in theatre thinks it’s all about following a script, everyone who is _in_ theatre knows that really? It’s anything but.

 

* * *

 

Being plugged into cans is like being plugged into the matrix.  Clint is a fixed point in a web of flux and chaos; he can’t see any further than the front of the stage, but at the same time he _is_ _everything_.  He is Steve’s index finger hovering on the lighting desk over the GO button; he is Tony’s hands dancing like a pianist’s across forty channels, EQ-ing like a hummingbird.  He is Pepper ripping mics and wires off actors with one hand while checking the squelch on the sound racks with the other.  He is the strain in Thor’s biceps as they drag impossibly heavy set-pieces onstage through the rushing and treacherous dark.  He is the burn on Natasha’s palms as she leaps off the parapets up in flies with the rope in both hands, using her own body weight to haul the heavy red curtain up.  And he is here at the prompt desk, eyes on the script, knitting everything together with the commands he is hissing in a voice not his.  He is everywhere and nowhere at once and he thinks the strain of holding the whole show together might kill him soon because _this musical is too fucking long_.

And then it’s over. 

“LX223 and tabs go,” says Clint, and stares at the _fin._ in his libretto while the lights come on and the tabs go up and there is the roar of the audience applauding.  _Why are they even applauding,_ thinks Clint dully as the cast form up and bow incessantly, _was that not the worst piece of shit they have ever seen in their lives, how can they possibly find anything good in that disaster –_

_–_ but they must have, because they keep applauding, and demand encores, and even after Clint has Steve put on the house lights as a poorly-veiled signal to _go home_ , audience members still insist on hanging about the orchestra, bantering with the conductor and wheedling snippets of the overture out of him.  The cast file exuberantly past the prompt desk towards the dressing room; some have the decency to thank Clint as they pass.  “You too,” Clint replies mechanically.  “Good show.  Good show.”

Clint is about to drag himself into action and start getting the stage back into pre-set for tomorrow night when the tabs ripple and some guy ducks through them.  “Hey,” says Clint, too tired to even be annoyed, “you can’t come through this way – ”

The guy ignores him, looks past him at someone over his shoulder.  “Tasha.”

Clint turns, and Natasha is standing frozen at the foot of the fly ladder.  “Alexi,” she says carefully.  “I told you to wait for me at stage door.”

“Well,” says Alexi, “you know I can never remember where this damn stage door is.”

“If you go down the auditorium steps and turn right,” begins Clint helpfully, “there’s a passage past the generator and then – ”

Natasha overrides him.  “I still have to wrap up here, Alex, please wait for me at stage door.”

“I’m not waiting at stage door.  I came through the curtains to tell you that.”

Natasha folds her arms.  Clint realises she looks tired, and also how alien that look is on Natasha.  “I’m sorry.  I know I said I wanted – ”

“Doesn’t matter, Tasha,” says Alexi.  “It wasn’t going to work, we both knew it the moment we stepped into this auditorium.  You know I don’t like being second choice.”

He looks at Natasha, who doesn’t flinch, stares him right back in the eye, and it’s Alexi who looks down and back up.

“It was a really good show,” he adds, a little sadly.

Natasha laughs.  It sounds a little rough.  “Are you kidding?  Did you see the number of things that went wrong?”

“I honestly didn’t,” says Alexi.  “I mean it.  It’s maybe the best show I’ve seen in this theatre.”

He pulls open the tabs and slips out again.

“Tasha,” begins Clint, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were on a – ”

“Clint,” says Natasha, very low and very fast, “give me something to do _right now_.”

Clint doesn’t hesitate.  “Go help Thor sort out what’s happening with the staircase/elephant.  After that you can help me count the number of masks and hula hoops, there should be eighteen masks and six hula hoops, put them in a pile on the desk in stage left.”

Natasha turns and strides away.

Clint starts rearranging the right wing, for lack of anything better to do.  He feels hollow.  He’s just called what seems popularly agreed to be the best show of the season, but Natasha has lost both a perfectly good dress and boyfriend for it, and Loki still won’t love Thor no matter how many staircase/elephants he builds him and maybe Fury won’t let Bruce back into the theatre again ever, and Clint is not sure this has been worth it, he really isn’t.  And it’s only opening night.

The others find him coiling cable by the prompt desk.  “Clint,” says Steve, “we have something for you.”

“We were gonna give it to you at the end of the run,” adds Tony, “but it seemed like you could use some presenting now.”

Thor hands him a small bundle wrapped in leftover gel backing.  Clint unwraps it.  It’s a Leatherman knife.

“From all of us,” says Natasha.  “We thought it was about time you had one.”

Clint turns the Leatherman over and over in his hands, fingers teasing out the various blades, screwdriver tip, corkscrew, pliers.  He folds them all back in, pulls out the one that is just a pure, simple blade, feels it lock into place beneath his fingers, watches the light play on it.  Then he raises his hand and slams it down on the prompt desk, and the tip of that Leatherman blade slides through a hundred pages of _Phantom_ libretto like butter.

“Rise, Hawkeye,” says Tony, “ _production manager_.”

 

* * *

 

They take their time with the pre-set, but even so the crowd outside stage door has hardly thinned.  “I loved it,” they hear someone gushing, “I’m totally going to see it again on Saturday even if I have to buy _standing_.”  Someone else: “Did you see that _chandelier?_ ” A girl by Clint’s elbow: “Oh my god, it’s that guy who played the Phantom, I have the _hugest_ crush on him – ”

Clint feels his eyeballs roll involuntarily towards the back of his skull, and observes with a lack of surprise as the rest of the crew do likewise.  Loki is standing on the steps swamped in followers and flowers; as they elbow through the throng past him, he spots them – and to their surprise, actually cracks a smile.   It’s made a little hideous by the broken nose.  “Thank you for all this, my friends.  You will be joining us for the after-party, I presume?”

Clint stares at him.  Stares at the open, incomprehensible arms, and waits for someone else to produce the comeback.  Until it occurs that the others aren’t staring at Loki, they’re staring at _him_ , because he is the production manager and he will speak for them all.

“You know what, Loki?” says Clint.  “Fuck you.”

He turns to the rest of S.T.A.G.E.  “Someone call Bruce.  We’re going for shwarma.”

Steve beams at him, one of those brilliant grins that could power a whole rig.  Tony laughs out loud.  Natasha’s smile is small and private, and she follows Clint as he turns and walks away, as they all walk away, leaving Loki standing outside stage door. Thor looks back, but Tony grabs his shoulder and he comes with them.

The moon is a sour yellow hole in a night sky that’s the colour of a 202 gel burnt out from long use.  They walk down a street newly wet with a rain Clint never saw, not within the walls of the theatre.  Tony on his left is trying to give Bruce directions to the shwarma place over the phone.  Natasha is on his right, walking small and compact, the tear in her dress a lopsided grin in the fabric.

“Hey,” says Clint.  “About tonight.   Thanks.  And sorry.  And thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” says Natasha, pursing her lips.

“Alexi,” he tries.  “Sorry about that.”

Natasha shrugs.  “It wouldn’t have been worth it.  I’d just have come back again.  Even if you hadn’t called, I’d have found a reason.”

It’s fifteen minutes to the shwarma place, and Bruce is already there.  “I took the liberty of ordering for you guys,” he says, smiling sheepishly, and Clint grabs him in a one-armed hug and they both know, in that, that there is no way they’ll let Bruce go.


	6. Tabs Coming In

Half a year after they wrap the get-out for Phantom, Clint watches Thor push a fresher off the catwalk.

The fresher starts screaming and finishes in a long drawn-out whoop as the harness catches in and swings him smoothly into the stalls.  “Fuck,” he gasps, “fucking hell that was _fun_.  Can we do it again?”

“No, Sam, you cannot,” says Natasha dourly, unbuckling him.  “To the stage now, go.”

Sam takes off at a run towards the stage, just as the next fresher, her hair whipping from the fall, tumbles into his place.  Up above, the last fresher hastily edges himself off the catwalk to avoid an over-enthusiastic Thor.

“I don’t remember having to do this,” says Clint in an aside to Natasha.  “Did you have to do this?”

“Not on my life,” replies Natasha under her breath.  “But we’ve never had three freshers before, and Tony’s getting itchy.”

Up onstage, Tony clasps his hands in a Machiavellian fashion.  “Greetings, freshers, welcome.  You are the select three who have survived S.T.A.G.E. Fresher Boot Camp.”

“We were the _only_ three to start with,” points out the middle fresher.

“ _Atittude_ , Wanda,” says Tony severely, “it does not sit well on a young person.  Give me five.”

Wanda grudgingly wanders over to the weight corner, where she starts shifting 5kg weights from one pile to the other.

“Now,” intones Tony, “you have been drilled in the art of the drill.  You have found the Striped Paint, or not.  You have conquered the Blackout Obstacle Course and endured LED: Sudden Death Round.  You have risen to the heights of loading and fallen from the catwalk. One last round stands between you and your full initiation.”

The last fresher rolls his eyes.  “I saw that, Pietro!” barks Tony.  “You’ll go first. Here, Widow.”

Natasha sighs and picks a slip of paper out of the safety helmet Tony is brandishing at her.  She positions herself in front of Pietro, clears her throat and reads: “What is the best emergency safety test for any piece of set?”

“Jump on it before the actor does?" hazards Pietro.

Natasha nods, peels a piece off the red LX tape in her pocket and sticks it on Pietro’s forehead.

Tony hands the helmet to Bruce.  “Wanda,” says Bruce, “name everything on Lighting Bar One from stage left to right.”

Wanda looks up.  “Sil starlette starlette par par cantata cantata mover par alto par profile par alto par mover cantata cantata profile profile par par starlette starlette sil.”

“Excellent,” says Bruce, and sticks a piece of green tape to her forehead.

It’s Clint’s turn.  He unfolds his paper and reads: “Your director, lead actor and stage manager are trapped in a burning house one hour before your show begins.  You can only save one.  Who do you save?”

Sam thinks.  “Save the lead actor.  By this point you no longer need the director and your stage manager knows damn well how to take care of themself, or they wouldn't be your stage manager.”

Clint sticks a square of purple tape to Sam’s forehead.

Tony moves to allow Steve to step forward.  “Captain?”

Steve takes his place before the freshers, who kneel as briefed.  Bruce hands him a mic stand.  Steve taps each fresher, once on each shoulder.

“Rise,” says Steve, “ _crew_.”

Tony cracks a grin, and over it all they hear the booming laugh of Thor from the catwalk.  Natasha catches Clint’s eye and winks, her lips showing a rare slice of teeth.

Yep, thinks Clint.  It’s looking to be a pretty good year.


End file.
